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11 Tips for New Digital Nomads

One thing I love about being a professional writer is that I get to do my job from anywhere. I don’t need a massive desk or a richly appointed office. (Although I do surround myself with books in my home office.) I’m a digital nomad.

My mobile office is a Filson briefcase I won about nine years ago where I carry all my essentials. As long as I have wifi and maybe access to an electrical outlet, I can work. As long as I have that, I can work anytime, anywhere.

I’ve been working as a digital nomad for 16 years, even when I had my an office. First in Indianapolis, Indiana and now in Orlando, Florida. I’ve visited hundreds of coffee shops, both corporate and independent, and I’ve made some of them my regular stops. Some of them I couldn’t leave quickly enough.

And while I haven’t achieved a #vanlife level of nomadicity (nomadic-ness?), I still consider myself a digital nomad who can do my job with a 13″ MacBook Pro and a Moleskine notebook.

Here is a list of things I have learned about being a digital nomad and making your city your office.

1. Keep your gear powered up

You would think I wouldn’t have to say this, but I went to a coffee shop with someone who shall remain nameless (but it was my son), and his laptop battery was at 6%. Luckily, we found a plug, and he was able to charge up. When you get home each night, plug everything in for the next day. Monitor your computer’s battery health. I use Coconut Battery to check every month.

Take advantage of free power whenever you can. If you find a coffee shop or restaurant that has plugs near your seat, use the power. Your next stop may see you running on battery for a few hours. Otherwise, plug in as soon as you get home and run any backups on your day’s work.

It also doesn’t hurt to carry an extra power bank. I like the Anker 20,000mAh chargers (affiliate link), but whatever you get, make sure it’s fast-charging. I also like the cordless banks. (There are some with built-in charging cords, but I worry what will happen if the cord breaks.)

2. Have a roster of regular stops

I have several favorite coffee shops, fast food restaurants, and even a pizza place (shout out to Lazy Moon UCF!) where I do my work. I know which tables have plugs nearby, and I plan my work sessions on their traffic patterns and busy-ness. (For example, weekends at Lazy Moon between lunch and dinner are ideal because the place is nearly empty, especially when the University of Central Florida is on break.)

Become a regular if you can, and get to know the staff. Be friendly and chat whenever you buy something. This way, you’ll stand out, and they’ll look out for you as they get to know you better. (Be sure to buy something every 90 minutes to two hours. Don’t just buy a small coffee and camp for eight hours.)

And don’t forget to tip!

3. Participate in the loyalty programs

If you go to the same places over and over, download their loyalty app. You may only get a small discount, like $5 off after 10 purchases, but a little something is better than a big nothing.

Supporting the loyalty program puts money back in your pocket through bonuses and special offers. It may not seem like much, but those freebies are a nice little treat when you’re trying to stretch your dollars. If you don’t like the freebies, then give them to someone else.

4. Shop local as much as possible

You’re a local entrepreneur, so support local businesses whenever you can. If you can go to an indie coffee shop or restaurant whenever you’re out, that’s great. The more you support local businesses, the more they’re going to be around.

5. Meet at indie coffee shops

Once you have your regular shops that you like to visit and you’re getting to know the staff, make sure you have your meetings at those places. Invite as many people as you can to those shops so they see you bringing in new people.

That not only shows your loyalty to the shop, you’re promoting them on your behalf. You’re helping their customer base grow so they can continue to grow and thrive themselves. I have one favorite coffee and donut place in Orlando that sponsors my local 1 Million Cups chapter. As I’ve gotten to know them, and they continue to provide their fresh-made donuts to us every week, I hold most of my networking meetings there. It’s a nice way to say thank you for their generosity.

6. But you can’t beat cheap

Still, if you’re watching your money, you can’t beat a $2 Coke at McDonald’s. You can sit for a couple of hours and work on just a single drink. I don’t recommend doing this every day since it’s not that good for you.

But if you only need a temporary office for a couple of hours, the Golden Arches has you covered, and they’re all over the place. It’s a great place to stop if you need to send a quick email while you’re on a road trip. Just be aware that many McDonalds don’t have electrical outlets, which is why you need to keep your equipment charged.

7. So join Panera’s Sip Club

First, I hate the word “sip” almost as much as I hate “moist.”

BUT I like saving money. And with the Panera Sip Club, I can go to a different Panera every two hours and get coffee, tea, or soft drinks. Or I can sit in one location and get free refills while I’m there.

I sometimes stop in, grab a table, and drink some coffee while I enjoy the free wifi. In fact, I know a guy whose neighborhood Panera is his office, and he’s literally there six or seven hours per day. (I’m not kidding.)

I just joined the Sip Club last week — it costs $15/month or $99/year if you pay annually — and I often go to the Panera near my house. I’ve already spotted several regulars who park at their same tables all day, every day, so it’s a viable remote location.

I know it’s not a local shop, but honestly, the redacted Club pays for itself in five visits. (And if you sign up via the app, you can get the first two months free.)

8. Get a VPN

Public wifi is wildly unsecure. You need to protect yourself, and a VPN is the best way to do it. Several years ago, I bought a lifetime subscription to VPN Unlimited for $69.99. It’s normally $199, but you can get it for $69.99 right now (non-affiliate link).

Note: One thing I have noticed about McDonald’s wifi is that whenever I visit a web page, the page refuses to load the first time, so I have to reload it a couple times. This has happened at several McDonald’s, so I think it’s a McDonald’s thing, not my computer. (Especially since a Speedtest.net test shows that their wifi is plenty fast.)

One day, I saw that when my VPN was on, the pages loaded normally. This makes me think McDonald’s is monitoring everyone’s web traffic to make sure we’re not up to anything sinister or bad, but it causes issues on our web browsers. I can use my VPN to not only protect my personal data but to improve their wifi performance.

9. Work on your local machine, store it in the cloud

The problem with being a digital nomad is that we’re dependent on wifi. When I first joined the Sip Club, I couldn’t get online in any of the stores. I was able to fix it eventually, but it was enough to almost make me quit the club.

Luckily, I was still able to work because I can access all my articles on my laptop before I upload them to clients. Even this article is being written in Apple Pages before I upload it to my blog.

While a lot of people like working on Google Docs or Microsoft 365, that’s difficult if you don’t have wifi. Yes, you can connect to your phone as a wifi hotspot, but it’s slower than dial-up.

On the other hand, by storing everything in the cloud, you can access it if you ever need to use a different computer. On my laptop, I back up all my in-progress documents on iCloud and back everything up to an external hard drive.

Then, I can access files using my iPhone’s Files app and work on them with a Bluetooth keyboard. Or if I know I won’t have my computer, I’ll save a version to Google Docs and use my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard on the road.

10. Learn how to use Google Drive offline

If you prefer Google Drive, there is a way to use it offline. I can’t tell you how because it’s been years since I tried it. (Find out how to do it here.) When you get back online, everything syncs up between your local files and your Google Drive.

It’s a convenient system if you’re focused on keeping costs down, but I’ve been using Apple’s word processor since it was called MacWrite in the 1980s, and I’ve used every version in between. I have no plans on switching now.

But if you’re an offline Google Drive user, let me hear from you in the comments below. What do you like about it? What makes you stick with it?

11. Set up “office hours” with fellow nomads

The one thing I don’t like about being a digital nomad is the loneliness. Sometimes, I miss working in an office because I miss being around people. (Not enough to go back, of course. A bad day working for myself is better than a great day working for someone else.)

Set up a working meeting with other nomads and work together at the same table for a few hours. You won’t get a lot of work done, but you’ll be able to socialize, get to know a few other people, trade ideas and resources, and it can help you find future collaborators to work with.

Take turns visiting each other’s favorite places and sample new restaurants and coffee shops. You never know when you might find a new regular spot for your journeys.

Being a digital nomad is actually a fun way to work. I get to visit different parts of the city and meet new people. I even created a map of all the indie coffee shops around Central Florida so I can decide where I’m going to spend a good part of my day.

Not to mention, if I ever go on a business trip or vacation, I can pack my briefcase and work from any hotel, restaurant, or coffee shop, no matter where I am. And if I ever just wanted to do a quick bit of work, as long as I have a Bluetooth keyboard and my phone, I’m all set.

Do you have any digital nomad tricks of the trade? Share them in the comments.

Photo credit: Erik Deckers

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How to Give a 6-Minute Presentation at 1 Million Cups

As an entrepreneur, you’ll often be asked to give a pitch about your company and your offering. Of course, there’s the 30-second elevator pitch, the 2-minute pitch, and so on, but you’ll have to pitch your company no matter what you do.

At 1 Million Cups (I lead the Orlando chapter), you have six minutes to give a presentation, followed by 20 minutes of questions, constructive advice, and feedback, about both your company and your presentation.

I’ve seen countless entrepreneurs give what is likely their first presentation, and they blow it. They try to cram as much information into their slides as they can, they fill us up with statistics and stories, and they tell us as much as they can about the problem, its scope, and the heartbreak of whatever it is they’re fixing. They also include their own journey, their history, how they learned about the problem, and how they decided to fix it.

Eugeniu Rotari of Via Typing presenting at 1 Million Cups Orlando.
They have a couple dozen slides — I once saw a presentation that had 30 slides — and they think six minutes is plenty of time to share their vision about how they’re going to solve this problem that’s plaguing millions.

Except they barely get through the first three slides when time runs out.

They failed. We didn’t learn about the company, their work, whether the problem can actually be fixed, or whether they’re the ones capable of doing it.

Ideally, when you have a six-minute presentation, you should have a slide deck with only six slides. Your slide deck should have very little text on it, and it should have stunning visuals. (Those are less important, but still helpful.)

What it should not have:

  • More than 5 bullet points.
  • More than 5 words in each point.
  • Organizational charts.
  • A doctoral dissertation’s worth of industry statistics.

How should your 1 Million Cups presentation should go

This is a Problem-Solution format that tells people, well, what the problem is, and how you can solve it.

Basically, your ideal slide deck should contain the following information.

  1. Opening splash screen
  2. The problem you want to solve
  3. The cost/size of the problem (the TAM, SAM, and SOM)
  4. The solution to the problem
  5. How YOU provide the solution
  6. Your contact info.

Don’t forget, your presentation should start with a story. Not necessarily a story about you, but about a client who benefitted from your work. Tell this while we’re looking at your second slide.

“ABC company had a problem: they were losing $50,000 per month on employee turnover and onboarding. We helped them identify a manager who was causing the high turnover and fed him to alligators. We also created a digital training and onboarding system that turned a three-month, paper-based onboarding process into a process that beamed important company information directly into a person’s brain. The company saved $600,000 per year, and they gave me a $25 Starbucks gift card.”

Or something like that.

For slide three, talk about how bad management and lengthy turnover cost American businesses eleventy-billion dollars per year. And in your chosen industry, it’s $2 billion. And in your home state, it costs your industry $500 million.

Slide four is about your alligator farm and data-brain transference beam.

Slide five is about how you patented the data-brain transference beam and now license it out to other HR consultants.

Slide six is how people can get ahold of you if they want to reduce their own onboarding costs, or are really tired of their brother-in-law.

Rather than squeezing every piece of information into your presentation that you can, leave that information for the actual Q&A portion of the presentation.

And if there was something you didn’t get to talk about don’t worry, there will be plenty of people with questions. But if it’s critical that you talk about it, then be sure to include it in your presentation. Cut something else out so you can get the most important information in there.

Another possible layout

Unlike the previous format, this is a Problem-Assistance presentation. Basically, you’re saying “I have a problem I need help with.”

Your format will look more like this.

  1. Opening screen
  2. The work you do
  3. How long have you done it/your education or experience
  4. The problem you are facing
  5. The things you have tried —OR — what kind of help you need
  6. Contact info

The information is the same, and maybe you’ll open with a similar story. But the focus of this presentation will be on your struggles with growth and expansion or finding new clients or dealing with pesky alligator inspectors or finding a good defense attorney.

The ideas are the same: You still only have six minutes, and you’ll get 20 minutes of questions and feedback. So don’t try to cram in everything, just include the basic facts and trust that people will ask you the questions that will allow you to share that information.

Be sure to practice your talk a few times, even if it’s just while you’re driving in your car. But as long as you’re telling your stories and sharing your information, the presentation will flow naturally, and it will come easily.

Finally, make sure you prepare your slide deck to show on someone else’s technology.

Good luck!

Photo credit: Erik Deckers

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Be Bold with Content Marketing Choices: Podcasts, Books, Graphic Novels!

There’s such a mountain of dreck and garbage in content marketing today that it’s burying all the good stuff. And that doesn’t include anything that’s generated by AI programs. Most of it is mediocre garbage created by barely-skilled practitioners who pray at the altar of First thought = best thought.

We miss out on all the good content because it’s buried by the same repetitive, 101-level nonsense — 5 Content Marketing Secrets (#1: Write good stuff) — that tens of thousands of other content marketers just sort of blurged out.

If content marketers want to stand out from the crowd, they need to be big and bold.

Fifteen years ago, when social media and blogging were just catching on, you could dominate your industry just by being on social media and having a blog.

Nowadays, you can’t not be online. You will be absolutely crushed by those companies that do. Imagine being dominated by another company that blogs once every three months and tweets every two weeks.

How embarrassing.

Enough With the 101-Level Content

That means creating stellar content. You can’t write the same introductory 101-level garbage that everyone else is. It’s been overdone, and you’re not going to stand out.

Do a quick Google search for your job or industry and the word “secrets.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.

. . .

How many results showed up? How many of them said the same thing over and over and over?

As you perused the results, were the top results from well-established brands with a major online presence and thousands of articles? Of course, they were. No one is going to supplant them without a lot of time, money, and effort. A lot of it.

When I did a search for “content marketing secrets,” not only were there 114 million results, but number one on the list was Hubspot, and the top info card was from ClassyCareerGirl.com.

So what sort of chance do I have of trying to rank #1 for that particular keyword? I would need to start a campaign that would take 80 hours per week, generate thousands of articles, and I would spend years doing social media promotion, and I would still be behind.

So rather than repeating that effort and writing the 114,000,001st “content marketing secrets” article, why not do something bolder?

Be Bold In Your Content Marketing

I’d love to see content marketers be big and brassy with their efforts. Don’t just limit yourself to blog articles. Do something out of the ordinary, something more challenging that not everyone else does. For example, you could:

  • Write a book on your subject. Not just a 30-page ebook either, but a serious tome about your specialist subject. Nothing says, “I know a lot about this” like a book.
  • Write a NOVEL about your subject. Remember The One-Minute Manager and Who Moved My Cheese? Those are technically non-fiction books called business parables. They’re stories that teach lessons through storytelling, not a dry recitation of facts. I’m currently working on a business parable for a client about his leadership philosophy.
  • Record a podcast. Some of the best practitioners in their field have podcasts, which is how they become leaders in their brands. There are podcasts on marketing, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, dental practice, and accounting. If you can think of it, chances are there’s a podcast. But there’s not your podcast.*
  • Write a graphic novel. I’d love to see a bank or wealth management firm teach kids about financial literacy, but with a graphic novel. Everyone’s got books and lesson plans to teach financial literacy, but no one has done it with a comic book. Now that’s bold!
    • Orson Welles directing The Mercury Theater On The Air.
  • Create an audio drama. If you’ve ever listened to old-time radio or modern audio drama (same thing, different names), then you understand the power of audio storytelling. Create characters, create a conflict (plot), and build a story around it. Hell, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck made a movie about a shoe! So don’t tell me you can’t tell a story about your field.
  • Better yet, make it an episodic soap opera. I would absolutely listen to a podcast about life at an insurance company that insures against superhero damage. You could use each episode to explain a small bit about the insurance industry — Acts of God, natural disasters, etc. — but make it fun to listen to as well.
  • Make a movie. See above about Damon and Affleck’s “Air.”
  • Do a weekly video series. Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and Wil Wheaton lookalike, established himself as the King of SEO with his weekly Whiteboard Friday videos, which Moz continued with after Rand left the company. Create weekly whiteboard videos that show you explaining a particular topic or concept to your audience.

* Tip: Podcasts make great sales tools. Invite your sales prospects to be interviewed on your podcast. They may not take your sales call, but they’ll be happy to be on your podcast. And they’ll remember you and what you do later.

That’s how you can be bold. That’s how you can make content that’s better than the average, run-of-the-mill content that’s burying all the good stuff. You can make things that stand out and catch people’s attention in a way that regular blog articles — like this one, I know — just can’t do.

And if you have any questions about book writing, blogging, writing audio dramas, podcasting, or content marketing in general, let me know. I’ve done all of that, and am happy to give advice and recommendations.

Photo credit: McFadden Publications, Feb. 1939 (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

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Book Authors, Your Publisher Will Not Handle Your Book Publicity for You. Only You Will.

A few days ago, I spoke with two different people who were ready to publish their very first book. They wanted to know how to find a publisher that would handle their book publicity for them.

“Oh, your publisher won’t promote your book for you,” I said.

“Really? I thought the publisher handled all of that!”

“No, not at all. Unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, your publisher won’t do shit for you.*”

* (Technically, that’s not true. Your publisher handles all editing, page layout, and cover design. You pay for that if you self-publish.)

It’s inescapable: When you write a book, you need to do your own promotion, or you need to hire someone to do it for you. Your publisher won’t do it, your agent won’t do it, your friends won’t do it. (Hell, they’ll barely buy your book!)

And people will not flock to your book just because you wrote it.

Your book may be great, but no one will care.

That’s because there are close to 1 million books published in the US each year. And if you count self-published books, that number is closer to 4 million.

Also, if you do manage to find a publisher, there’s only a 1% chance that your book will reach a bookstore.

Out of the 1 million books published this year, only 10,000 will make it to a bookstore. (My last edition of Branding Yourself was not placed in Barnes & Noble, even though they carried the last two editions plus my other book, No Bullshit Social Media. My publisher said Barnes & Noble just wasn’t a viable partner for them anymore. One of the biggest biz-tech publishers in the country, and they no longer worked with Barnes & Noble.)

So, your book is not going to magically sell just because you wrote it. If it did, we’d all be rich.

Which means you need promotion and publicity.

But your publisher is publishing dozens, if not a few hundred, books per year. Do you think they have the time to devote to your book and ignore all the others?

Absolutely not. If your publisher can put any weight behind the promotional efforts, it will be a few hours of sending a generic press release to all the same media outlets, blogs, and podcasters they send all other book announcements to. And then it’s on to the next book. And the next one. And the next one. And soon, your book is forgotten along with all the others they just promoted.

In fact, when you submit your book proposal or manuscript to a publisher, they’ll want to know the size of your social media footprint and newsletter subscription list. And if it’s not “a lot,” then they won’t publish you. It doesn’t matter if your book is the second coming of Confederacy of Dunces, they will give you a hard pass.

Which means you’re on your own.

Which means — and I cannot stress this enough — you need to do your own book publicity.

Let me say that again but in a bigger font.

You need to do your own book publicity!

If you don’t do it yourself, your book will not get promoted.

Oh sure, you could pay someone to do it, but you won’t get good publicity for less than a few thousand dollars per month.

It’s a question of time versus money: If you don’t have the time, then you need to pay someone to do it. If you don’t have the money, then you need to do it yourself.

Without explaining how to do it all (because there are several good books on the subject (affiliate link)), your publicity efforts should include:

  • An email newsletter campaign.
  • A social media campaign (Twitter and/or Facebook, plus maybe TikTok).
  • A book reviewer/blogger campaign.
  • A podcast interview campaign.
  • A paid online advertising campaign.
  • An email-your-friends campaign. (Email each of them, one at a time, ask them to buy.)
  • A convention/conference campaign.

You don’t have to do all of these things, but you need at least two of them — the first two — because they’re the easiest, they can be automated and scheduled, and they’re free. (Sign up for Mailchimp or Moosend; they have free starter options.)

I don’t care if you hate social media. I don’t care if you don’t know how to do an email newsletter. I don’t care if you hate having to email 200 book bloggers one at a time.

You have to do it. You have to do it. You have to do it.

Because your book won’t sell otherwise. Period, end of sentence.

Otherwise, your book will be the greatest thing you’ve ever done that no one will ever know it. You’ll sell it to a few friends and family members, and your partner will secretly buy three copies and give them to friends. But it will be just a tiny drop in 4-Million-Books-Published-Each-Year Ocean.

So let me say it again, but in red: You need to do your own book publicity!

“But I don’t like social—”

I don’t care. Get over yourself.

“But I don’t know how—”

I don’t care. Figure it out.

“But I don’t have the ti—”

I don’t care. Make the time.

“But I—”

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

I don’t care. Do you know who else doesn’t care?

Everyone!

You need to do book publicity to make them care. You need to promote your book until you’re sick of it. And then you need to promote it some more. And when you think everyone else is sick of it, promote it some more.

Bottom line: You’re going to spend 90% of your time writing your book. And you’re going to spend the other 90% promoting it.

Because if you don’t do it, no one else will. No one will care as much as you. No one is invested as much as you.

You can either pay someone to do it, and they won’t spend as much time on it as you want.

Or you can suck it up and do it yourself.

Because your publisher will not promote your book for you.

Final note

All of this is not to discourage you into giving up or not seeking publication. You absolutely should. Submit to agents and publishers and get your book out into the world. You deserve to be published! People should read your work. Just be aware that your work is not done once you write The End. It’s only beginning.

Photo credit: Dimhou (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Questions About Personal Branding for the Writing Workshop of Chicago

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Writing Workshop of Chicago about personal branding secrets for authors. We had a great question-and-answer period at the end, but we ran out of time before we ran out of questions.

So the organizer and fellow humor writer, Brian Klems, forwarded the questions to me and I decided to answer them in a blog post. This way, he can refer all the attendees to this page and there’s a permanent location for the questions. But more importantly, I’ll get a bump in web traffic.

First, Yvonne asked, “Are Facebook author pages useful?”

Yes, they are, for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of your readers are on Facebook and it’s easy to point them to that page. Second, it gives you more privacy because you don’t have to be Facebook friends with your readers. You don’t necessarily want them to see your personal stuff, so an author’s page is a great way to do that.

However, keep in mind that Facebook limits the reach of its pages in the hopes that you’ll pay to boost your different posts. Depending on what you write, you might be better off creating a group about your books or topic. Groups updates are not throttled the way a page’s updates are, plus you can encourage more discussion among your readers.

But don’t let the Facebook page/group be your main hub of activity. Try to have a writer’s blog/website as your central hub and treat Facebook and other networks as the spokes.

Maria asked, “I’d always heard you should not post the same things on your various social media channels, so you give people an incentive to follow you in different areas. Your thoughts?”

That’s mostly true. One thing to keep in mind is that people will not see all your social messages. That is, my readers don’t see what I post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the same time. People have their preferred social networks and probably won’t go to the others just to find you.

Having said that, you can take advantage of each network’s format to post your best message. You get 280 characters on Twitter, but you get 2,200 on Instagram. You may want to cram several #hashtags into a tweet, but stick them in the first comment on Instagram.

If you want to do simple things like sharing Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, you can automate that with Zapier or If This Then That. You can set it up so when you post a photo to Instagram, it will automatically be shared to Twitter and Facebook. That’s a real time saver. But if you want to have separate and distinct messages, you can either do it one at a time, or you can use a service like Loomly to post from a single dashboard. You can also use HootSuite, but it costs nearly $50 per month, compared to Loomly’s $26 per month. Which makes me think doing it one network at a time is ideal for most writers.

David wanted to know, “How important in LinkedIn for authors?”

That depends. It’s critical for business/non-fiction authors, not so much for fiction writers. You can find readers on LinkedIn, even if you’re a scifi/romance/mystery writer, but it’s going to be difficult to find them since most people go there looking for work-related content.

If you only have a limited amount of time and energy to focus on one or two social networks, stick with the ones that are going to do you the most good. LinkedIn won’t be that unless you’re writing business-related books.

Howard wondered, “What do you think about #BookTok on TikTok?”

Honestly, I haven’t watched it enough to have a strong opinion about it, but I will say that anyone who’s talking about books is doing important work, and they’re finding thousands of fans.

There are several channels/creators who have gotten very popular on TikTok talking about writing and books. So if you want to join their ranks, go for it. TikTok has become an important platform for a lot of people, mostly Gen Z, so you should take advantage of that.

Clare asked, “How does your intended audience shape how you brand yourself? For example, I write middle grade fantasy.”

That’s a great question, Clare, and almost worth its own blog article, if not an entire book!

Remember, a brand is an emotional response people have to our face and our name. (Or if you’re a company, the emotional response to your name and logo.) When you think about brands like McDonald’s, Nike, BP, or the Chicago Cubs, people have an emotional response to them. They love them or hate them.

So the emotional responses our readers have become our brand. We can shape and hone that brand ourselves, but ultimately, we’re not responsible for how people perceive us. We can do all sorts of great work and people’s emotional response can be “Yay!” “Ugh!” or “Meh.”

Having said all that, you should treat your personal brand almost like a persona or a character you play. That’s not to say you should lie about who you are. Rather, your personal branding efforts should match what your readers and fans expect of you.

If you’re a middle-grade fantasy writer, the kinds of things you share on social media should be about middle-grade fantasy subjects: swords, dragons, wizards, etc. It’s not really the place to write at length about the supply chain crisis or your thoughts on the January 6 hearings. You can do that elsewhere, but not on your author profiles because it doesn’t match what your readers want.

On the other hand, if you’re a political/current events writer, you don’t necessarily want to share your cosplay photos from Dragon Con.

So, in that sense, your audience shapes your personal branding efforts because you should give them what they want.

Cindi wanted to know, “Do you use some of the new social media platforms, Locals, Rumble, Spotify, and Truth Social?”

Not really. For one thing, there are thousands of social networks these days, compared to the few dozen there were when I first started doing all this in 2007. So I can’t even keep up if I wanted to.

Having said that, I’m not against using a new social network, and I’ve joined a few but I never stick with them. However, I’m always on the lookout for new alternatives to the ones I use now. Is there a new Twitter alternative? Where should I go if Facebook collapses? Is there something better than LinkedIn?

Ultimately, if I can find a network that looks like it won’t fail, doesn’t depend on rocket-like growth just to survive, and lets me quickly and easily post updates (this is one reason I haven’t gotten into TikTok yet), I’ll use it.

And finally, Mandy put a smile on my face when she said, “@erik awesome stuff (no question) :-)”

Thank you, Mandy! I appreciate it. I always have a great time speaking to the Writing Workshop classes.

If you have any other personal branding questions, just drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Taken from “10 Personal Branding Secrets for Authors” by Erik Deckers”

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Don’t Worry If You Write Similar Articles: 5 Reasons Why You Should

Sometimes when I’m working with clients, I’ll write similar articles with topics that overlap in one or two ways. They cover nearly the same topic. Or they use some of the same keywords. Or they cover two different solutions that solve the same problem. Or two different problems that can be fixed with the same solution.

The clients will often want to scrub the similar articles, worried about the overlap.

“It’s fine,” I tell them. “It doesn’t matter if we have overlap. In fact, we want them to overlap, and here’s why.”

And then I lay out concise, logical reasons about why you should write similar articles for content marketing purposes.

Your readers are not reading every article.

People come to your website because they’re looking for a particular solution, or because they came in on a single Google search. When they come, they’ll read the article they need and then they’ll leave again. They don’t poke around looking for similar articles, and even if they find them, they won’t suddenly abandon their quest for your product.

“Oh, crap! I was all set to spend six figures on this solution, but these jerks wrote two somewhat similar articles!”

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? That’s because it doesn’t happen. And if people do find two similar articles, they may read them both, which is what will ultimately drive them down your sales funnel.

People are using different keywords or phrases to find you

Your website should rank for different keywords; those keywords will bring different people to different blog articles and landing pages. They search for different keywords because they have different questions or different problems. You can’t just write one blog article or one landing page and expect it to do everything for everyone.

Your readers are not looking for the same exact thing, which means they can be served by slightly different articles.

Years ago, I had a client that manufactured different attachments for skid steer loaders (e.g. Bobcat). Among their 200+ attachments, they made snow plows, snow pushers, and snow blowers.

And so we wrote different articles about why they needed plows over pushers, pushers over blowers, blowers over plows. And then we wrote the reverse articles: pushers over plows, blowers over pushers, plows over blowers.

Why?

Because different people came to the site for different reasons; we had to write the articles that would tell them what they needed to know. They came in looking for a particular keyword in relation to a particular question — “Do I need a snow plow or a snow pusher?” “Do I need a snow pusher or a snow blower?” People didn’t have identical questions, so we couldn’t give them a single, one-size-fits-all answer.

Our job was to answer that particular question, no matter what they were looking for. So we created slightly similar articles to do just that. The end result is the client saw a significant increase in sales because everyone could find the infomration they needed.

People come to you via different paths.

Sometimes people find you because of social media, not SEO. That means you should be tweeting and sharing your articles several times in one week. When I publish my humor columns, I tweet the link three times on Friday, three on Saturday (including 3 AM), and once on Sunday and Monday. I also publish it on Facebook and LinkedIn (when appropriate). I do it because all my followers aren’t eagerly awaiting my next column, racing to read it by 9 AM on Friday morning.

My readers are on social media at different times of day — morning Twitter readers are not necessarily afternoon Twitter readers. And the 3 AM readers are probably in the UK and Europe, or they have severe insomnia.

More so, most people don’t see any article I post, which means I can’t count on my audience to see every single thing I’m posting. Still, I need to give them several opportunities to find it, so I need to share it more than a few times.

That may happen with your readers as well. A reader who catches your latest tweet about your latest article may have missed the hundreds of tweets you’ve sent over the past several months. And it’s the only one they’re going to see. But another reader saw your article from three months ago and they missed this new one completely.

Both articles may have been slightly similar, but each reader only saw one article, so they each may need to cover some of the same material. There are a few major points you need to stress over and over, not because you want to beat people over the head with them, but because everyone is arriving at different times to different landing pages.

People don’t remember what you said three weeks ago.

You’ve heard that people need 6 – 8 marketing touches before they make a buying decision. Which means it probably doesn’t hurt that they hear some of that information 6 – 8 times just to remember it.

And we don’t retain the information we’ve read very well, especially when we read on our mobile phones and laptops. (We retain information gleaned from paper reading better.)

That means people aren’t going to remember what you wrote in your blog article three weeks ago, so it’s OK to remind them of it once in a while. In fact, the more you remind them, the more likely they’re going to remember it as they make their buyer’s journey.

IT’S FOR SEO. NOT EVERYTHING IS FOR YOU!

Given everything else I’ve said up to this point, the most important thing is that you’re writing articles for Google.

Now, before all the content marketers start jumping up and down on me with hob-nailed boots, I am NOT saying that you should write for bots over people. I want you to do the opposite of that at all times.

But what I am saying is that you cannot ignore the bots. People will come and people will go, but these bots will be around forever. They’ve been crawling my first blog since 2003, they’ve been crawling this blog since 2009. But my readers? I doubt very much that I have any readers from 2009, let alone 2003. But Google has certainly been around since then, and they’ve been tracking my SEO for the last 19 and 13 years.

That means I need to keep the bots happy and give them plenty of rich content with the right keywords, images, videos, and so on.

And yes, I absolutely need to write for my human readers. They take top priority in all the work I do. I need to write well, I need to be interesting, I need to be relevant, and I need to be entertaining.

But I can do that and still incorporate the right SEO tricks to keep Google happy. I can walk and chew gum at the same time.

One of those tricks is to write multiple articles with topics that may overlap from time to time. It doesn’t mean to write identical articles, or to even write articles that are 50% different from the previous article. (A common SEO cheat is to rewrite articles so they’re at least 25% different and post them in different places to make Google think they’re two different articles.)

It means knowing that different people will read different articles at different times. It means publishing interesting, well-written pieces that provide some sort of value — education, information, entertainment, etc.

But the bottom line is that while you’re writing for those people, you must write for the bots as well. You can do that and still sound human when you do it.

If you can’t, then hire a professional who can. We’re the ones who know how to write for the bots in such a way that the humans will never know.

And vice versa.

If you’d like to learn more about writing for search while writing for people, let us know. We’d be happy to tell you more.

Photo credit: Bob Adams from George, South Africa (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)